Joel Kinnaman’s Leading-Man Evolution
As an actor, Joel Kinnaman used to think of himself as a weasel. Not a rodent, per se, but a weasel-like human, the kind of guy who plays drug dealers and police informants and creeps. He was not, he thought, leading-man material. “I thought I could play like a weaselly snake,” he told me, perching precariously on the back frame of a couch in a New York hotel suite, so his besocked feet rested on the cushions and his rangy figure loomed over the room. His oeuvre was full of characters like Stephen Holder, the laconic, jittery, lovable secret meth addict Kinnaman scored for his first American role, in the AMC drama . Or Rodion Raskolnikov, the starving, disaffected failure in Dostoyevsky’s , whom Kinnaman once played in a four-hour stage production in his native Sweden. These were his people: the oddballs and losers, their torsos etched with tattoos, their undereye
